This paper analyzes a prominent dimension of the initial policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic observed in many countries: the imposition of export restrictions and actions to facilitate imports. Weekly data on the use of trade policy instruments during the first seven months of the COVID-19...

This paper presents new high-frequency data on trade policy changes targeting medical and food products since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, documenting how countries used trade policy instruments in response to the health crisis on a week-by-week basis. The data set reveals a rapid...

The growing importance of services trade for countries across the world is well-documented in the services and trade literatures. At the same time, regulatory and administrative barriers to the movement of service suppliers to deliver services internationally have resulted in very low shares of...

How does trade affect the design of preferential trade agreements (PTAs)? What is the role of global value chains (GVCs)? The authors answer these questions by empirically investigating the causal impact of gross and value-added trade on the depth of PTAs. To solve the critical issue of...

In the first two months of 2021, the production of COVID-19 vaccines has suffered setbacks delaying the implementation of national inoculation strategies. These delays have revealed the concentration of vaccine manufacture in a small club of producer nations, which in turn has implications for...

In 2016, the Government of India proposed negotiations on an agreement to facilitate trade in services to complement the 2013 World Trade Organization Trade Facilitation Agreement in goods. The proposal did not find much support, but plurilateral talks launched in 2017 on various policy areas...

Most goods imported from developing countries, enter Quad markets duty-free, and, average tariffs in Quad markets are very low. But tariffs for some commodities are over one hundred percent. Such "tariff peaks" are often concentrated in products developing countries want to export: agricultural,...

Actual, and potential competition is a powerful source of discipline on the pricing behavior of firms with market power. The authors develop a simple model that shows that the effects of new entry, and import competition on industry price-cost markups, depend on country size. The authors...

In this paper, developed as part of the World Bank's Poverty Reduction Strategy Sourcebook, the authors examine how to implement trade liberalization as part of a strategy for alleviating poverty in developing countries. They discuss trade policy instruments, institutions, complementary...

At the recent World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial meeting in Doha, Qatar, WTO members called for the launch of negotiations on disciplines relating to competition based on explicit consensus on modalities to be agreed at the fifth WTO ministerial meeting in 2003. WTO discussions since...